


Important Matters

by Pom_Rania



Series: Little By Little [13]
Category: Star Wars: Rebels
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Chopper actually does care, Ezra gets a hug, Ezra needs a hug, Gen, Kanan and Hera also need hugs, Sabine gets a hug, Sabine needs a hug, Zeb gets a hug, Zeb needs a hug, dealing with grief, everyone deals with grief differently, getting bad news, they hug each other offscreen, visually-impaired Ezra Bridger
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-18
Updated: 2017-02-20
Packaged: 2018-09-25 09:54:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,384
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9814241
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pom_Rania/pseuds/Pom_Rania
Summary: Sabine and Zeb return home from their mission, to learn something that will change their family forever.





	1. Chapter 1

Hera was waiting for them when Zeb and Sabine arrived. She nodded at them. “I’m glad to see you both back safely,” she said. “I trust your mission went well?”

Sabine felt the corner of her mouth twitch. “It was... interesting,” she settled on. “We already reported to Sato on the way here, but I can share the highlights if you want.”

“Highlights,” Zeb repeated. “You blew up a tree while I was still in it!” 

“I already said I’m sorry, I didn’t know you were there; besides, you weren’t hurt, and it got the alligator-wolves out of the way.”

“I thought we were calling them wolfigators?”

“I’m sure this will be a fascinating story,” Hera said, “and I look forward to hearing it, but later. There’s a family meeting scheduled for as soon as you two were back, in the lounge, and it’s important.”

“What’s it about?” Sabine carelessly asked, as they started towards the Ghost.

“You’ll find out there.”

“Not even a hint?” Sabine remembered meeting to hear that they were low on supplies, to plan out future missions or surprise parties, or when the “meeting” had turned out to be a surprise party. She was expecting a smile, or a frown, or a whispered explanation. 

She was not expecting the complete lack of expression on Hera’s face, and in her voice. 

“You’ll find out at the meeting. Come along.”

Zeb stopped walking and crossed his arms. “No,” he said. “I’m not going any farther, not until you tell us what’s wrong. This isn’t like you. Are you under duress or something?”

Hera turned, blinked, and her mouth partially opened in surprise. Obviously that was _not_ the case. She recovered, and gave a quick smile. “No, that isn’t something you have to worry about here,” she said, and subtly twitched her lekku in the all-clear signal they had established. 

“Then why can’t you tell us?”

She closed her eyes, and when she opened them, her face was back to a studied neutral expression. “It really isn’t my place to talk about it. You’ll understand later.” 

Sabine and Zeb exchanged glances. There was no chance it could be anything pleasant, even if it wasn’t dangerous. Neither of them voiced their worries, but she could see the direction of his thoughts in how his ears twitched, and hers had to be just as apparent to him. 

They followed her. There was nothing else to do, not at the moment. 

Once back on the ship, Hera went straight to the lounge while Sabine brought her pack to her own quarters, and Zeb presumably did the same. She was apprehensive, and anxious to find out what it was and get it over with, but very few situations were made better by carrying unnecessary baggage. She forced her worries to the back of her mind and put everything back where it belonged. Depending on how bad it was, she might not be able to, afterwards. 

“We’re here,” she heard Zeb say as she entered the room where they were meeting. “Care to tell us what the big surprise is?”

Everyone was there. _Good_. Surely they would have been told if someone had died, and Hera would have been a lot more visibly upset, but still. 

“So,” she said with forced cheer, “who’s dying?” There was no way it could be that bad. Right?

“Nobody,” Kanan answered, “not to the best of my knowledge.” She relaxed, slightly. Whatever it was, they could probably deal with it.... “Unless someone else is hiding something.”

Zeb looked at her. She looked at him, then looked around. Hera was very steadily keeping her gaze on the two of them, and very definitely not looking at anything else. Kanan, well, he couldn’t really _look_ at anyone, but she saw that his hand was on Ezra’s shoulder. Ezra was quite intently studying his fingernails. Despite wearing gloves. 

She honed in on him. “Ezra. What is it?”

He glanced up at her, then quickly looked back down. 

“What’s wrong?”

Kanan leaned in closer to him. “It’s okay,” he murmured. 

Ezra suddenly gave a wide grin. “How did your mission go?” he brightly asked. 

“It went well, but that’s not the issue here,” Zeb growled; he was worried, not angry. 

“Things have been okay here... nothing much really happened, just the usual, Chopper being a pain as always, Hera getting on my case about cleaning the ship....”

Hera made a strangled noise of protest, facepalmed, and sighed.

That was when Sabine noticed what she _didn’t_ hear: Chopper. The droid was being unusually silent. She glanced over – yes, he was there, and not powered down. Normally he would have been chattering, especially after such a slight against him, but he was quiet. Subdued. Almost like when....

Zeb had caught onto that as well, and his ears dropped. “It’s bad, isn’t it,” he said. 

Ezra looked away. “It’s... it’s not _that_ bad,” he said, and tried to force a smile. “Hey, did I ever tell you guys the one about the stormtrooper, the TIE pilot, and the farmer? So they walk into a bar, and –”

“Yes, you have. Five times,” Sabine forcefully stated; and all of those times had been when he was trying to avoid talking about something, which was blatantly obvious. 

He pulled at his collar. “I can’t keep this a secret from you guys.” He laughed, but it sounded fake. “I literally can’t, because you’d notice sooner or later.”

They waited. 

He put his hands behind his back, stared at the ceiling, and began to tunelessly hum. 

“Do you want me to tell them,” Hera quietly asked, but Kanan raised a hand in her direction and shook his head. 

“Tell us _what_?” Zeb demanded. 

Ezra shifted, and it seemed like he was clenching and unclenching his fists. He looked... lost, or afraid, and that didn’t belong on him, not like that. 

“I’m... it’s like....”

Sabine felt pure dread rise up in her chest. _Whatever it is, don’t say it._ She thought that she would rather forever exist in that moment of anticipatory agony, than _know_. As things stood, it could be anything. There was even a small chance that it wasn’t really anything bad.... 

“My vision’s been getting worse for about a year. I’m going blind.” He weakly smiled. “Sorry I didn’t tell you earlier.”

What.

What. No.

That didn’t make sense. It couldn’t be. 

“What happened?” she distantly heard herself ask. “Is it from an injury?” If it was, she would find the person responsible, find them and _kill_ them and tear out their eyes and present it to him on a silver platter.... 

“No, it’s genetic. Sacul Syndrome. My aunt had it. Normally it first starts in your late forties, I’m just unlucky enough to have the early-onset variety.”

Nobody to avenge herself upon, nobody to blame, only his parents for passing on the genes, and they were guiltless and dead besides.

“Are you sure about this? No mistake?”

Kanan spoke up. “I was there for the tests. I heard the formal diagnosis,” he paused, “and the prognosis. The medical droid was quite certain.”

“They’re not infallible. Do you trust it?”

“Yes. Enno-fifteen is the same droid who treated me, after Malachor.”

Sabine remembered “after Malachor”. She remembered Kanan – no. Ezra couldn’t be forced to go through that as well. It wasn’t fair. ( _Life_ wasn’t fair, she knew, but that didn’t stop her from wishing otherwise.)

“How –” _how advanced is it, how much time do you have left, how did you not say anything_ , but the words caught in her throat. 

“I understand that there will be questions,” Hera said calmly, too calmly. “I have prepared an overview, along with answers to some of the questions we anticipated. If you would care to look at this....”

“You seem to have everything under control,” Ezra said with a slight laugh, “so if that’s it, I guess I’ll... just....” He slipped past them, and was out of the room before Sabine could think to say anything. 

She looked at the datapad she’d been given. The letters refused to resolve themselves into words, and seemed to lose all meaning under her gaze. She peered closer, and the lines blurred into an indistinct haze, as did everything else. Was she – crying? 

She sank into a chair, and wiped angrily at her eyes. She had no reason to cry, she was perfectly fine, it wasn’t like she was the one losing her... going....

She pushed away the datapad, and it fell unheeded to the floor. “I can’t do this,” she muttered. “I can’t read, I can’t focus, I c-ca–” She burst out in tears. She couldn’t control it. 

Somebody asked if she was okay, and she couldn’t even tell who it was despite knowing all the other people there. She wasn’t okay, she wasn’t in the same _galaxy_ let alone same planet as “okay”, but she wasn’t the one they should be worrying about, she shouldn’t be causing any extra problems.... 

“I shouldn’t be crying,” she babbled, “not when everyone else is handling it so well, and you two had known earlier but Zeb just found out now and he’s calm and –” She buried her face in her hands. “I’m sorry,” she managed.

“What makes you think I’m calm?” Zeb asked.

“You’ve been reading –”

“I’ve been turning pages,” he corrected, “but I haven’t looked at any of the text. You’re young still, and you’re in a safe environment. You don’t need to keep silent, and you don’t need to hide your grief.”

“I should be the one to apologize,” Hera said. Sabine looked up at her. “I shouldn’t have dumped all that information on you like that, and expected you to be able to read it so soon. Take those with you, and look through them when you feel up to it.”

Zeb took another glance at his datapad, then put it away. “Can you just tell us the most important stuff we need to know?”

Hera spoke in a measured tone. “Currently, Ezra’s main problems are difficulty seeing in low light and a reduced field of vision.” Zeb’s ears tensed and lowered, and Sabine remembered him complaining about Ezra keeping the light on at night. “There are also issues with fine detail such as small text, and distant objects, but those are easily compensated for.

"At the moment, accommodation is... mostly....” She trailed off. Kanan put an arm around her shoulder, and she leaned into him. Light glistened off her cheek. 

“Accommodation is mostly limited to making sure there is sufficient illumination, and that any text is large enough,” he continued, as if they had practiced it. Maybe they had. “I’ll be working with him, on other matters, for the future.”

Sabine didn’t want to be helpless and powerless; not in this, not in anything. “Can anything be done to help?”

“Help, yes. Be there for him, try not to leave things in the way, don’t grab his arm without asking.... But as for preventing further vision loss, or restoring what he’s already lost, no.”

“...how long?” Zeb said. “How long does he have?”

“He’s not _dying_ ,” Hera immediately corrected, but she knew what was meant. They all did. 

“Enno-fifteen didn’t give a definite timescale,” Kanan said. “There are too many variables to predict the course of any disorder with both accuracy and precision, he told us.” His hand reached for Hera’s. “He was however confident that total vision loss would happen within five years, following significant and then severe impairment.”

"And ‘total’ here means...?”

Kanan vaguely waved his free hand in front of his face. “Nothing.”

Five years wasn’t enough time. And Sabine wasn’t exactly sure how “significant” or “severe” impairment were defined, but they couldn’t be good. 

She felt numb, like all the blood had drained out of her. The skin under her eyes was sore and irritated. “Is that it then for now?”

Chopper beeped a negative. Wait, hadn’t he been over there? She hadn’t noticed him moving, and turned to look. 

He was at the door. Apparently he had left the room and just then come back. He carried with him a stack of mugs, a thermos, and a box filled with what looked like flavour packets. 

He came over, and waved at her to take something to drink. She poured herself a mug of what certainly appeared to be hot water, and selected a flavour packet. She didn’t normally pick “hot chocolate”, but at the moment that comfort was what she wanted. 

She didn’t bother to sniff the packet before tearing it open and mixing the powder with the water. “If this is capsaicin powder again I’m going to disassemble you,” she said, but the threat had no energy behind it. Chopper gave a halfhearted intended-to-be-mocking chuckle. 

The droid moved on. Zeb took three different packets to stir in. She didn’t know how he could even drink that concoction; she had tried it once, and couldn’t taste anything else for the rest of the day. Sometimes she wondered if it was a “Lasat” thing or a “Zeb” thing. Maybe his species had a different tongue configuration, or maybe he was just weird. Zeb’s tastes were an easy and safe subject to speculate on.

Hera quietly told Kanan what flavours there were; he made his choice, and she handed it to him. Just a small thing, but it was impossible for him to do by himself, no matter how good he was with the Force. 

Sabine imagined Ezra asking what flavour a packet was, because he couldn’t see. If she thought about it, she didn’t have to imagine. She remembered the last time they’d had this, and how he had asked her to pick out one for him. The writing on the packets was small. He hadn’t been able to read it. 

She slowly sipped at the beverage. Holding it gave her hands something to do, and an excuse for none of them to talk. She didn’t want to talk. She wanted it to be a dream and wake up in a better world, where nobody was going blind and Chopper didn’t have to be helpful. While she was at it, she might as well wish for the Empire to spontaneously collapse with nobody else having to die, and ration bars to taste good; that was roughly as likely, and if she was going to engage in fantasy she might as well dream big. 

The hot chocolate was lukewarm, and mostly finished. She didn’t remember drinking it. Some of the powder had settled to the bottom, creating abstract patterns of dark and pale. She remembered hearing of telling one’s fortune by the arrangement of tea leaves left afterwards. Those weren’t leaves, but she could see the future anyways: Ezra turning his head at the sound of her voice, and his eyes never focusing on her, maybe only half-open because it didn’t matter to him. Or maybe it was her imagination. It didn’t matter the source, if it was still going to happen. 

She drained the rest of the beverage, and left her mug on the table when she got up. It didn’t matter. Nothing that she could do really mattered there.


	2. Chapter 2

It was obvious, really. She only had one real course of action, in any situation where she felt like that, and that was to draw. Art always made her feel better.

Except when it didn’t. 

Sabine started blankly at the wall in front of her, a canvas waiting to be filled, but nothing came to mind. It just seemed... pointless, meaningless, when soon a full third of the crew wouldn’t be able to appreciate her work. 

She carefully put her supplies back where they belonged. She would never let her paint go to waste through carelessness; colours had been difficult to obtain, in those dark years at the academy, and the habit served her well. Art was there to be seen and experienced. An explosion might last for only a moment, burning through all its components, but the memory endured; paint spilled down cracks or dried in the can or thrown away was good for nothing and served no purpose. 

She sat down, got up, turned around, and threw a pillow across the room in frustration. She sank back down, and let her eyes unfocus. Colours and shapes blurred together, creating new patterns and combinations. She didn’t cry. 

She remembered Ezra admiring her paintings, offering to be her “inspiration”; he hadn’t been too pleased the first time she took him up on that, immortalizing the bunk-bed incident, but later came to see the humour in it. She remembered his compliments and giggles.... 

She remembered describing her art to Kanan, and how he would smile, but still look kind of sad. 

“I’m sure it’s beautiful.” She had grown to _hate_ those words. They meant that he couldn’t experience it. They meant that he was reacting to whatever he imagined, instead of what her own hands created. 

They meant that he couldn’t see. 

Sometimes she forgot; or if wasn’t entirely forgetting, then it didn’t matter to her. He could get around by himself, he could tell who was near him, he could fight, and it could seem as if everything was fine. He no longer stumbled or groped at walls, but there was still that gap between him and her paintings that couldn’t be bridged, could never be bridged.

Art was more than just colour, even if colour was what she felt most strongly. She had tried to find something that would work, something she could make that he could experience that could bridge that gap, but hadn’t succeeded. Attempting sculpture only made her fingers sore and her head hurt from frowning at the material that simply would _not_ go where she wanted it to. She had researched, and discovered that there were entire planetary traditions of tactile art, but aside from those which required non-human anatomy to create and/or perceive, they seemed to need specialized _expensive_ equipment to make. 

She had given up, then, lethargic from grief and quiet despair (and that old voice in her head telling her that if even a _Jedi_ could be brought so low, she didn’t stand a chance). 

But that wasn’t an option any more. 

So she wasn’t cut out for sculpting. Big deal. She would find _something_ , some way of expressing what she saw in the world and what she needed to share, that could be experienced by people without full or any use of their eyes. If she had to create an entirely new branch of art, she would kriffing well _do_ that. She was intelligent. She was creative. She was Mandalorian. She was a Rebel. She was Sabine Wren, Spectre Five, member of the Ghost crew, and she was not going to let anything stand between her and her family; not her past failures, not progressive vision loss, _nothing_. 

Maybe she needed to start with the basics. Non-visual senses included sound, taste, touch, scent, and apparently the Force, but she couldn’t do anything with that last one so she was disregarding it. She had never been that great with music. Cooking, although she enjoyed the results, wasn’t something she could express herself with in any way more advanced than “it is cold, so warm food would be nice”. People said that there was an art in mixing pleasant fragrances, but she didn’t really believe it. That left touch, as before. 

What could she get out of something just by feeling it? General shape, temperature, texture... patterns.

That reminded her. Dot writing, or the tactile alphabet as it was properly called, especially in the context she was going to use it.

She had first heard of it back at the academy, as a method in which messages might be passed. They hadn’t been expected or encouraged to learn it, only be able to recognize it, and decode brief passages with the aid of a guide sheet. When the dots were raised, they could be read by touch, given sufficient practice and sensitivity; she wasn’t able to do that, but it was possible. There had been maybe a brief mention that it was used as a form of written communication for blind people, but the academy didn’t care about that. She had forgotten all about it, along with other things she had been forced to learn, until that suddenly became relevant to Kanan.  

She had looked it up then, found all the arrangements of dots that represented each letter, and tried to reproduce it. She didn’t have any tools for that purpose, so had done her best with drops of dried glue and indentations on thin metal, solely to try and get the point across. It had been time-consuming and messy and probably not entirely accurate, but that was all she could do, to try and show the tactile alphabet to Kanan. 

He hadn’t expressed an interest in it. Then again, he hadn’t expressed an interest in _anything_ back then, so that in and of itself didn’t say much.

There were two main parts to reading the tactile alphabet: understanding each symbol, and being able to recognize what symbol something was by feeling it. The former had been hard enough for her, when she only had to glance over at the guide sheet for the Aurebesh equivalent; she couldn’t imagine how difficult it must be for somebody to have to learn both parts at the same time. 

Ezra didn’t have that problem though, not yet. He could learn it from looking at it, like any other code. And if he knew that, it would be easy enough to add raised portions to anything she painted, describing what it showed. It wasn’t an ideal solution, or even close to one, but it would work for the moment, until she found something better. 

She had a goal now, and a direction. She just needed to copy all her references on dot writing, make sure that everything was clear enough for him to read, and... get him to study and learn it, which was completely out of her power. 

She slumped back. Once again, nothing she could do. No. Not nothing, never. She was only as powerless as she let herself be. She could convince him, or she would find something else. She had successfully mocked and evaded the Empire across a good chunk of the galaxy; getting one person, with whom she was already on good terms, to acquire a relatively simple skill was an attainable goal. 

She still had files from when she was researching the tactile alphabet (albeit hidden deep in some folders so she wouldn’t have to constantly look at them and be reminded of how she couldn’t do anything). She could easily copy those to a datacard and give it to Ezra, and trust that she would be able to motivate him properly. But... would he be able to read it? Hera’s datapad probably had the answer to that question, but Sabine didn’t think that _she_ would be able to read it. 

She would deal with that later. Right now, it was most important to actually take action. 

Maybe it would be easier for him to read something written on a sheet of flimsi. She didn’t know, but it didn’t matter. She could make a guide sheet of her own for him, along with the information on the datacard; and that way, there were more chances that something would work. 

She loaded up the file giving all the letters of the tactile alphabet, and went to work on copying it out by hand onto flimsi. The dot arrangements seemed so arbitrary, but if she expected Ezra to memorize them, it was only right for her to try and learn it as well. She had vague memories of learning how to read as a little child, and how the shapes and lines didn’t seem to mean anything, but that had eventually changed, and it was now intuitive. Anything that was physically possible could be learned, with enough practice. She believed that. 

Finally, she finished making the guide sheet. She looked over it – a bit messy, but acceptable – and stretched her wrist. The files were loaded on the datacard. She just needed to get it all to Ezra. 

She was in the middle of the doorway when it occurred to her that she had no idea of where to find Ezra. She mentally shrugged, and kept going. She would find him, eventually, some way or another. 

“Eventually” ended up being not that long, as it happened. He was in that very corridor, slouched against a wall and trying to look invisible. She recognized that posture. It brought to mind happier memories, of pranks and trying to avoid the consequences thereof; jokes that were hilarious when played on Zeb (even if not so funny when she was the victim), and Zeb hunting after Ezra for retaliation. 

She had never thought.... When he couldn’t see, would he still be able to.... She blinked the sudden tears away, and shook her head. 

It didn’t seem like he’d noticed her. She wasn’t sure if he could see her from there, at that angle; she didn’t want to startle him, but she didn’t want to insult him either. Now she could stand there all day hoping for a perfect solution to present itself, or she could do something anyways. There were no explosives involved, so it was safe to act first and think later. 

She cleared her throat to announce her presence, and looked away from him. If he jerked up in surprise, if he turned his head in annoyance, or whatever he did, she didn’t notice. 

“Oh, hi Sabine.” His voice was casual, like he hadn’t just revealed – how long ago was it now? It couldn’t be more than an hour or two, at most – something that would turn all their lives upside-down. “What is it?”

There was tension in every line of his body now. He seemed nervous, or hesitant, as if worried about how she would act. He didn’t make eye contact, and for an instant she was worried herself – was his sight worse than she thought? – but then she realized he was just avoiding her gaze. Understandable; she was having a hard time looking at him as well. 

Her body seemed to move on its own, and she stepped closer. “You need to learn this,” she said in a rush, and shoved her pile at him. “Careful, there’s a datacard in there. I copied the files out. For you. I wasn’t sure what.... Anyways. You need to learn that,” she repeated. 

He reached for it automatically, and paged through it. He held one sheet close to his face, and frowned. “I’ve seen this before,” he quietly said, more to himself than anyone else. 

Really? Where? “Really?” she said. “Where?”

He flinched at that, for some reason. “On Noisi’s door,” he said, like the words were pulled out from him. “The med droid, that Kanan took me to. But it was raised there, the patterns. On the door.”

Wasn’t the droid’s name “Enno-fifteen”? Not that she had ever checked the designation, but that was what Kanan used. Still, “Noisy” was a good fit, from what she remembered of the droid, from the one time she had taken Kanan to his appointment there. 

If there were symbols that looked like dot writing, and it was raised, then it was probably the tactile alphabet. Maybe there would be other things she could learn from the droid, or at least ask if there were proper resources available instead of having to raise each dot individually.... “Huh,” she said, to fill in the silence while her mind worked. 

Ezra stepped back, and he held the sheets and datacard close to his body, like a shield. He turned partially away from her. “Is that everything?” he asked, and she realized that he was expecting unpleasant and awkward questions. 

No. Not now. She would never do anything to hurt him. There was only one awkward question that needed to be asked at the moment.

“Can... can I give you a hug?”

He tensed at her voice, then relaxed once he registered what she’d said. “Yeah. Okay.”

She wrapped her arms around him, tightly, like she could protect him from what was eating away at his vision by sheer force of will. He didn’t melt into the embrace, like he normally did with a hug. She felt the stiffness in his arms, in his back, and probably all over. If only there was something more she could do to help! 

“You know we will do anything for you,” she fiercely whispered. 

He gave a quiet, almost mocking, bark of laughter. “Yeah? Anyone got a spare eye I could borrow?”

She considered that. If it was a viable option, surely Ketsu would have a contact or two who could direct her to any organ –

He must have sensed the direction of her thoughts. “Wait, no, it wouldn’t work,” he hurriedly said. “Noisi said that. It was... something about optic nerves. Cybernetics as well. And heh, it was just a joke anyways, you know?”

She dutifully tried to laugh. It probably sounded like a mynock being strangled. “Anything else?”

“How about a blood oath not to make fun of me in any art I can’t see?” From his tone of voice, he probably intended it as another joke. It was serious to her, though. 

“I will,” she murmured.

“Uh....”

The moment was over, and she let go of him. _Nothing more she could do.._.. No. There was something she could do.

“Make sure you read and learn that,” she said again, and gestured vaguely at the stack. 

“Why? What is it?”

_Something to let you read when your eyes give out._ “It’s a thing. A thing you need to know.”

He gave her that familiar “seriously, Sabine” look. It wasn’t all about where his gaze was pointed, but also his eyebrows, so he would probably be able to make that expression without being able to see her. “That doesn’t say very much.”

She shook her head. “Something I was taught a while ago. A type of code. Or cipher, I was never very clear on the difference between the two. Just... check it out.”

“Why?” he said. 

She couldn’t tell him. She could barely even think it for any length of time; there was no way she could say it. Suddenly she couldn’t stand to look at him. She mumbled something indistinct and fled.

Once safely away from him, she wrapped her arms around herself. She had done what she could. Now she... what? What did she do now? She could go back to her quarters... alone, with her clamouring thoughts for company. She would rather not. But she knew where Ezra was, which meant he wouldn’t be in the room he shared with Zeb. Maybe Zeb would be in, and she could talk with him. 

She hesitated at the door to their room, then knocked. “It’s Sabine.” She didn’t know if anybody was there, but just in case.

“Come in,” Zeb called. 

He was sitting on his bunk, the datapad from Hera in front of him. He looked normal, until she noted how defined the muscles on his neck were; he was clenching his jaw, and probably tensed all over. 

“Get any reading done?” she lightly asked. 

He glanced up at her. “I’ve memorized the table of contents, if that counts. Did you know that she appended an entire text on anatomy of the human visual system? At least, it’s listed there, I haven’t gotten far enough to actually check for myself.”

She sank down beside him. “I wasn’t able to even open it again,” she said. “I just....” She let her gaze wander. “I tried to draw something, but it wasn’t working.” How many of the posters on the wall were important to Ezra? “I gave him the files I had on the tactile alphabet, and told him to learn it, but I couldn’t tell him why.”

He gave a soft grunt. “I don’t think I recognize the name. What is it?”

“It’s raised dots.” That was easy enough to say. “The arrangement of the dots determines what letter it is, and it’s easier to learn them by looking, so I just drew them and wrote the Aurebesh next to it.”

“That sounds... interesting, maybe?”

She leaned into him. Zeb did have a noticeable scent from up close, but it wasn’t unpleasant, and it was a reminder for one more sense that she wasn’t alone. She wasn’t dealing with this alone. “It’s a form of writing for – for – a way to read without having to look. I thought that if he learned it, I could use that to put a description of my artwork so he’d be able to know what....” She sighed. “It seemed like a good idea at the time. It just sounds stupid now when I say it like that.”

“At least you got something done.”

“What about you?” she asked. “You can’t have been only staring at that one screen this whole time.”

“I was.. remembering something.”

She waited, to see if it was something he wanted to talk about. 

“Now, I’ve never shared this with anyone before.” He drew a slow breath, and turned his head away from her. “Do you remember Chava?” he asked. 

The name sounded familiar. “Isn’t she the old Lasat woman we brought to Lira San?”

“Yeah, that’s her.” Zeb picked at his nails. “Back on Lira San, when we were getting ready to go down to the planet... she pointed at Ezra, and told me that he wouldn’t see his 25th birthday. I asked her what she meant, of course, but she said that she only passed on what was given to her by the Ashla. I tried not to think too much about it; we’re in a war, after all, and there’s no guarantee that any of us will survive the next week, much less the better part of a decade. Then, once we landed, there were better things to dwell on, and I pushed it to the back of my mind, but I couldn’t completely forget it.

"In a way, and it sounds terrible to say it, but I’m glad he’s going to be blind within a few years. It means that he won’t _see_ his 25th birthday. There’s a way for me to trust a spiritual leader of my people, without believing that he’ll necessarily die young.”

She was silent for a moment. “You’re right,” she said. “That does sound terrible.”

He flashed a grin in response, but it quickly faded. “I don’t want it to happen,” he quietly said. “I don’t want my family to suffer. But I’ll take anything, if the alternative is losing them.”

“I remember when Kanan....” She rubbed her eyes. “It was wrong, and it shouldn’t have happened, and then he was here but so far away from us for so long, and I don’t know if I can go through that with Ezra too and come out the end.”

He wrapped an arm around her shoulders. “It’s a different situation, and they’re different people. Kanan suffered a lot that Ezra won’t; Ezra will be going through things that Kanan didn’t. The only thing guaranteed the same....”

“...is that neither of them will be able to see anything,” she finished. “How did this happen? We end up with the last two Jedi in the galaxy, and both of them have vision problems?”

She felt him shrug. There was no real answer to be given. “At least, with Kanan as he is, there’s someone who can help Ezra with... everything he’ll have to learn.”

_Everything he’ll have to learn_ , which would be _everything_. She imagined it. She didn’t have a choice in the matter; the mental images battered down the metaphorical doors and flooded her mind, flooded her eyes with tears again. 

When she became aware of anything more than those thoughts circling around in her head, Zeb was holding her. When she could see clearly again, without the liquid distortion, she noticed that his eyes were dry, with not even a slight indication of muss in the fur underneath.

“You haven’t been crying,” she said, almost accusingly. If anything, the accusation would be directed at herself.

“I can’t cry,” he simply said.

That didn’t make sense. “Wait, I know for a fact that –”

He cut her off. “It’s nothing to do with my body. My eyes tear up from onions and irritants, and I can laugh so hard I cry, but I learned how not to cry a long time ago. I was forced to get so used to it, that now I can’t cry when I’m upset even if I wanted to.”

She wasn’t the only one hurting, even if the others weren’t as obvious about it. She remembered Hera breaking off mid-sentence, and Kanan reaching for Hera’s hand, and Chopper’s subdued behaviour... not to mention every single thing Ezra did. She hugged Zeb back. He needed it every bit as much as she did. 

“What do we do now?” she whispered. 

“We survive, and keep moving onwards. It’s all we’ve ever done, and all we can ever do.”

“How?”

He shifted, and unwrapped his arms from around her. “Maybe we can start by looking at what Hera made for us. She said there were answers in it to questions she thought we’d have, and once we know what we’re dealing with – what Ezra’s dealing with – we can better figure out what to do.”

“What we’re _all_ dealing with,” she corrected. If it hurt one person, it hurt all of them. They were a family. “Maybe... maybe if I’m going over it with you, I’ll actually be able to read it this time.”

“And I’ll be able to get past the table of contents?” He reached across her and grabbed the datapad. His hand shook; not much, but enough that she saw the datapad wobble. Sabine steadied it with her own hand. 

“We can... skip the intro page,” she suggested. 

“Not much we need to know on there anyways,” he agreed.

They loaded up the next page. She squeezed his shoulder, and began to read.


End file.
